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Switzerland’s federal prosecutor has charged the commodity trader Trafigura with bribing foreign officials in Angola.
In a criminal indictment filed on Wednesday, Trafigura and its former chief operating officer Mike Wainwright were accused by Swiss investigators of arranging about €5mn of bribes to an Angolan government official between 2009 and 2011.
In return, the official, who was also charged, authorised eight ship-chartering contracts and one bunkering contract that resulted in profits of $143.7mn for Trafigura, according to prosecutors.
It is the first time Swiss prosecutors have brought criminal charges against a company for bribing foreign officials.
Trafigura said the charges were linked to investigations by authorities in the US and Brazil, revealing for the first the time that it had made a provision of $127mn in its 2023 accounts, due to be filed on Friday, to resolve a probe by the US Department of Justice over past “improper payments” in Brazil.
In a statement, Swiss prosecutors alleged that Trafigura’s internal regulations and culture “[were] not in conformity with international standards on preventing and combating corruption and [were] not apt to prevent the high risk of corruption associated with the Trafigura group’s activities”. The failings went up to the “highest level” of the company, it said.
“We sincerely regret these incidents which breached our code of conduct and are contrary to our values,” Trafigura chief executive Jeremy Weir said in a statement.
The Swiss charges come as Trafigura is already in court in London in a high-profile dispute with a former customer over a multimillion-dollar trading fraud, which the commodities trader claims it was a victim of.
Swiss prosecutors accuse Wainwright, who was not named in the indictment, of approving bribes to the Angolan official, who was also not named, including €4.35mn paid to a bank account in Geneva and $600,000 paid in cash in Angola.
The official allegedly concerned was chief executive of Sonangol Distribuidora, a subsidiary of Angola’s state-owned oil company Sonangol, which is responsible for marketing and shipping the African nation’s petroleum products. The official could not immediately be reached for comment.
A third unnamed individual — a former Trafigura employee — was accused of facilitating the bribe payments via an offshore entity.
Trafigura said the ex-employee was a former consultant to DT Group, which was a joint venture formed in 2009 by Trafigura and Cochan Holdings LLC, an investment vehicle controlled by a former military adviser to Angola’s then president, José Eduardo dos Santos.
Under dos Santos, who ruled Angola for almost four decades before losing power in 2017, Trafigura dominated the supply of petroleum products in Angola, generating bumper profits that supported the company’s transformation from a scrap trader into a global commodity giant.
In a statement, Trafigura said it had been willing to resolve the probe and would now “defend itself” in court. It had “significantly enhanced” its compliance processes since the period in question, the company added.
Wainwright joined Trafigura in 1996 and was one of the most senior people in the company for more than a decade. He served as chief operating officer from 2008 until April of this year, when Trafigura signalled his intention to retire from the company in March 2024.
Trafigura said Wainwright “rejects the charges against him”. He could not immediately be reached for comment.
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